beekeeping in germany!!!
Written on April 14
I've joined the beekeeping society in the neighborhood where I'm living, and it's so beautiful. I'm also learning enough German to be embarrassed of the mistakes I made just a few hours or days ago. I tried to ask if a plant was native to the area, and was very proud of myself for remembering the word "herkünftig," but when I actually looked up that word in the dictionary I realized that what I had said was "Is this plant original?" No wonder the other person didn't get what I was saying.
At the club fair, I went straight up to a boy at a table selling honey, and said "Ich will die Bienenpflege-verein betreten" (I want to join the bee-caretaking society), not knowing the word for beekeeping but thinking I could kind of guess by translating the parts of the word directly. Not so! The word for beekeeping is imker (would have never guessed), and the boy looked at me like I was very strange. "Was?" (What?) There was music playing loudly, so even after he switched to English I still had a hard time understanding him. But I got his phone number and got him to tell me what day and time the beekeeping club was meeting, and then I showed up. (On a Saturday at 10am. True commitment.)
The meadow is very beautiful, and other than 1 girl from my same study abroad program, everyone in beekeeping is German, male, and tall. They're also almost all older than either of us. The first day, we were just looking at the hives to check on them, but we found indications that the bees were getting ready to swarm and find a new home, so we made plans to come back the next day (Sunday, at 9am (!)) to split the hives. The hives were forming new queen cells, and would soon all abandon the hive for a larger home somewhere else with their new queen if we didn't do anything.
Today we split the hives, which entailed setting up some boxes (Zagen) with little shelves for the bees to form honeycombs on (Rähmchen), and then opening up the existing hives (Völker) and putting the shelves that had queen cells growing on them in the new hives. One of the bloody things about bees is that when a new queen hatches, she will go over to the cells of her still-developing rival queen siblings and sting them through the cell wall, killing them. There can be only one. "Just like in real life," one of the boys joked.
We made sure the new hives would be successful by putting enough shelves with brood (meaning, cells of still-developing worker bees) in the new hives. That way, the queen will preside over a hive with enough workers in it that the hive will have a good chance at doing well.
Opening up the hives is always a process that involves many casualties. The beehives are so completely crowded with bees that even though we're careful when taking the shelves out of the boxes, some bees always get crushed. It's sad, especially because the ones that are only partially crushed don't die right away… But that's real life. The bees were getting angry (verärgert) because we took a really long time splitting the hives. (I may have been contributing to that with all my questions about bee terminology in German… but you have to have your priorities straight!) One did sting me, but I was wearing a glove so the stinger just got stuck in the glove and had no effect. It's sad that that bee had to die for no reason, but she was trying to protect her hive.
It's kind of like if King Kong were to lift up a giant skyscraper, "just to check and see what's going on in there," move all the cubicles around, and then put it back. Except with the building being as crowded as an urban subway at rush hour. There's no real way to prevent bees from getting crushed when things are that crowded, no matter how careful you are.
Anyway. I've been learning a lot! Both specific beekeeping vocabulary, and German cultural norms, and just getting practice using German on a regular basis. While I've studied German for 8 years total, I haven't taken a class on it in 2 years. So I'm a bit rusty when it comes to actually putting sentences together and having them come out of my mouth correctly. I'm still at the "very aware of all the grammatical mistakes coming out of my own mouth" skill level, but I am trying to ignore embarrassment and just say shit when I want to say shit. It's the only way I can get my question answered/make friends with these people. And the beekeeping members do seem to be warming up to me! They were a little wary of me yesterday on Saturday, when I was just an outsider showing up, but when I came back for the Sunday 9am splitting the hives, they started being more relaxed around me, asking questions about what the biggest culture shocks were and stuff like that. They let me use the soldering iron too, when we were preparing the frames for the new hive. :)
Cultural difference of the day: after we were done with this project that took 3 hours, I said "Good job everyone!" and one of them said, "Germans don't say good job with you're done with something, they just nod." Man, that just sounds so cold. You do all this work and that's how little acknowledgement you get? I really prefer American culture in that aspect. I want recognition for hard work!
Germans are sensitive about having their photos taken (which I respect so much!), so I'm not posting any pictures with people in beekeeping in them.
